Working for the Company Store

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At my shop the company economists regularly read the NY Times. We do this in order to understand what is coming down the pike and also so that Pat Gilbert won't have to.

General Electric just sold it's financial division to a company called BlackStone. Blackstone is notable for it's real estate holdings. They buy massive quantities of single family residences for rental purposes.

In other news, Amazon is moving into Angie's List territory. When you buy a faucet you also get a list of approved vendors to install that faucet.

In Seattle & Long Island foreign investors are snapping up the high dollar homes. Over 40% of all single family residences over $1million were sold to Chinese Nationals.

So what does this mean for us?

We saw how Houzz took over the kitchen design business. Imagine Houzz with a budget behind them. This suggests we should all learn to take good pictures.

Wall Street competing for the houses our customers remodel means we will soon have fewer customers that feel a need to remodel. While this is still small scale it will grow. The REIT investors make their decisions to buy based on price/earnings ratios. After they have hoovered up all the tier one properties they will lower their standards and go after the lower market niches.

The REITs will buy up these houses and split them into 7 bedroom rentals so those of us who are favored by Amazon can rent a room.

In my neighborhood you can't go a half block without seeing a big hole in the ground that will soon house 1000 workers. These workers all have to live somewhere.

A customer of mine remodeling a victorian house in San Francisco lamented that all these young workers were primarily foreigners who come from cultures that favor modern architecture. She said all these wonderful in-city treasures were being gutted and their historic moldings replaced with stark contemporary. My company focuses primarily on traditional architecture so I guess we will have to soon trot out the white bread work.

GE selling off the financial part of their business might be telling? It was Jeff Immelt that got the last crash going by telling Henry Paulson the sky is falling because GE got caught in a "liquidity crisis" doing risky things with their investments and more importantly would have cost Immelt his bonus if they were not bailed out by the taxpayer.

I suppose now that they cannot play games with their money, it is no longer profitable.

That is interesting about Amazon, off of this forum I have seen posters say that Yelp does not work for the cabinet shop, where as Houzz does. Which category would Amazon fall under?

The REIT thing is yesterday's news. Maybe a good candidate for shorting?

The foreign investors are trying to find a place to park their money. Remember when we through this with Japan?

The main thing driving the cabinet business is demographics. People do kitchen remodeling when they are 50 to 60. After 60 they don't buy much. That is a problem because the biggest clump of the boomers are now 58 and 59.

In addition of course is the off shoring reducing the cost of kitchens.

I think in our industry the QE money has manifested in high end to upper middle class residential and large commercial jobs. This because low interest rates create projects that are long term and very sensitive to interest rates and residential because those home owners have done well in the stock market and have refinanced.

Going forward the entitlements are going to be more and more onerous which does not bode well for any part of the economy. Once again because of demographics.

But in a sentence the problem simply is that the Fed did not allow the market to clear. Which has resulted in what you see today.

The REIT thing may be yesterday's news but it will become a problem for us in the future.

The pile of money available for these kinds of purchases just continues to grow and grow as it has from the days of the pharaohs. Once the banks figured out they couldn't sell you a house with a stupid mortgage they settled for renting you the house. The first round of houses they buy will be those with the least hassle factor and best price to earnings ratio. After those evaporate they will go down market. Like a starfish scouring the ocean floor they will latch onto every possible source of revenue until there is no more. Then they'll go after the food. You gotta eat, and sleep somewhere and get haircuts. Eventually they will annex the barbers.

So this probably does have some impact on cabinet land but just not so obvious yet.

I would guess that Amazon will eventually have some kind of vetting system for their handyman team, kind of like Amazon Prime. If you're on the team you get a discount on materials you buy from Amazon. Stop buying your materials from Amazon and you're no longer on the team.

The influx of foreign office workers will have more influence than just aesthetic tastes for the cabinets we sell. They will bid up the rental market so high so low wage earners can't afford to live in the city. Starbucks won't be able to pay a barista enough to overcome their overhead so you will instead join the Starbucks team and get a discount for ordering your latte on an i-Pad app. You'll have to either pour your own coffee or get it out of a vending machine.

I do believe that Houzz offers some tremendous opportunities but you're going to need to know database in order to harvest them.

The REITs will only be a problem if they get bailed out. The only reason this is happening is because of the Fed making cheap money available.

Amazon is going to have to make a profit at some point, Alibaba does. IOW guys comment on this site that they can compete with Home Depot quite nicely so unless Amazon is willing to subsidize their construction business it ain't gunna work as we know how hard this business is.

Regarding the influx of Foreign Office workers, what you talking about Willis?

You are chasing the big evil business boogeyman, what we have here is a failure to invest in business and the consequent dearth of jobs. Since the housing market is a synthetic economy a huge chunk of the economy is missing.

According to exchange theory something only has value if you can exchange it for something else. The exchange theory economists conclude therefore that there is no such thing as need but only want. They can even prove this mathematically on a chalk board.

This is wonderful in theory but people do in fact have needs. They need a place to live. Just like the school teachers, policemen and firefighters need a place to live we need someone to pour coffee for us. This is the fall out from REIT investment.

If you take home ownership away from everybody but the gentry you end up with Somalia. You'll have to band together in caravans to go visit your relatives in the country because you'll turn the corner and find the road is blocked and suddenly notice that big truck in your rear view mirror that pulls out behind you from the alley.

"The exchange theory economists conclude therefore that there is no such thing as need but only want"

That is a myth, disseminated by those who benefit by such specious (my most used word when talking to Lefties about economics) thinking.

Think of it this way, in the beginning you had a barter economy. Before you can trade something you have to produce something to trade. That fact does not go away because you have a monetary economy.

This is defined in Say's law.

The fallout from REITs is just a symptom of the Fed making too much money available and that money not going into investment but speculation.

Somalia continually improves under their Xeer Law, IOW based on property law with no statutory law, something we could use a lot more of as in tort reform.

One of these days you are going to have to let go of the big evil business boogeyman, it is just not the way it is. But that is the last thing you guys can see, IOW you cannot see crony capitalism for what it is.

What has happened in Mexico is a product of the US drug laws. Remember 80% of the people that are incarcerated are there for drug charges. We have the most prisoners as a percentage of the population in the world.

Income inequality is simply caused by inflation as it greatly benefits those who invest ahead of the inflation curve as in real estate and stocks.

And the corollary is that the money is not invested so there is a dearth of jobs.

Seriously, when I was younger, I sure thought you had to be pretty smart and organized to a) run a business b) be in politics c) be rich. The older I get, the more I realise it is oh-so-much not the case.

As far as I've seen it, intellect and power are sure not tied.

And you have some misguided folks trying to make sense of the chaos, as if it were super planned and organized.

Usually that's where conspiracy comes out of. But I'm starting to think we are way sloppier then any organized story tells.

Not one person on the planet knows how to make a mouse, yet it gets made without having too many mice or too few mice. Yet there is no over seeing governing agency seeing to it that there is an adequate supply of the materials required, how can that be?

And when it is tried to be organized by a central party they fail miserably. To the point that Khrushchev was ashamed at how his system had failed his people, after visiting an American supermarket.

It is self organizing and it is not chaos. In fact I would say the purpose of man is to put order into the chaos. Otherwise we would all be listening to the tribal leader around the camp fire.

So most of us have our favorite cognitive paths. Like a mold. So we chuck whatever comes at us into those molds.

But we keep forgetting what is outside-can't see it when you are busy sorting out material into molds. And worse then that, we keep reading "smart" people that agree with us, nodding in agreement, "yes this fits".

But lets face it, every one of us is wrong all the time. Our society praises confidence, but absolute confidence gets in the way of deeper digging.

Actually Pat if you think about it nobody really cares about economic philosophy from 300 years ago. On the other hand we are all quite enamored of the pieces of furniture and architecture that remain from yesteryear.

I would remind everyone that back around 1960 there were a million+ people in civil mental health confinement in the US.

Over the next 20 years, we virtually EMPTIED those facilities, and shut them down -- civil rights and all, don't you know.

Lo and behold, yet another 20 years later, we have an extra million plus confined in prisons.

Is it shocking that a form of substitution by the government bureaucracy went on for decades? I don't think so.

Mentally ill people (in general) have to be confined -- when on the loose (and unmedicated, as they tend to become) they regularly (and perhaps unknowingly) commit crimes, some minor, some major, against the general public -- and so they will be confined, one way or another. Civil confinement is off the table, so what are you left with?

That's the hard, cold fact. It's not that we love to throw people in prison. They wind up there because the other options have been largely foreclosed.

Prison is a particularly bad environment for the mentally ill, but there we went for decades, and still go to this day, having little other choice. Thanks a lot "civil rights" guys.

Mel, you're a spunky devil but I'd encourage you to gain a little better understanding of what actually drives any economy. It's called investment.

Higher levels of investment = increased productivity = higher wages. Simple as that. It's worked for over 200 years here and longer elsewhere.

Anything else doesn't work. No matter what anyone thinks the "social benefits" of any particular program may or may not be.

About your investment thesis, by investing in say a CNC router, you can produce more parts in a day than 3 men using table saws and hand drills. So you now have caused more unemployment! You could increase employment by banning the table saw and requiring only hand saws to be used. Most likely you would then need several more people to be put to work. With less lumber needed per man day of work the forests would be saved. The result would be only those filthy rich folks would be able to have your cabinets, assuming you paid a living wage, (soon to be required by law.) The living wage determination would take several years of Congressional studies, consultants and piles of back room deals. That would add to the people employed. The economy would be at full employment!

There is another possible approach.
We could put the unemployed to work guarding the fence perimeter. Somebody has to deal with the great unwashed when they breach the first line of defense. If you tell the guards that whatever food the prisoners eat comes out of their share then you can simultaneously lower the overall cost of groceries.

100 years ago over 30% of the American work force were farmers. Today about 2.5% of the American work force are farmers.

What happened to all the farmers? They went to work in other fields.

You are assuming that the economy is a zero sum game(that the pie does not grow). IOW if you put somebody out of work that he has no other options.

But it does grow as indicated by the size of todays economy compared to the size of the economy back in 1915.The problems occur when it is prevented from growing or establishing values.

This is a win win situation, even in our little corner of the economy. By creating robots using computer technology it allows the products to be produced cheaper and in a much more complex design.

What this does is allow the market to grow and people who would not have been able to afford custom cabinets now can. Does this put cabinetmakers out of business that do not adopt CNC? You bet, but it allows the market to benefit and the shops that embrace the technology to prosper. So are these other cabinet makers permanently out of work? No they adapt and see where they can fit into the economy. Or they get into something else.

Every time there is a recession the tide goes out and we find out who has been swimming naked. This is a natural part of the business cycle. The problem is when the government steps in and props up these people who should have gone out of business. As it diverts capital that should have gone to new upstart companies that create the economy anew in new directions that nobody predicted. E.G. Apple, Google, Amazon, 3d printers, bio engineering, coming soon nano engineering, oil fracking who would have thought that we would have seen below $50 per barrel oil in 2015?, etc etc etc.

The harm comes when we try to meddle with the very reason that the US has a 18 trillion dollar economy.

Econ, you are good stuff. Plus I kinda like a "spunky devil" call out... ;)

So about the mentally ill--I've spent the last 10 years in the heart of Vancouver. They have virtually shut down the big mental institution in the name of "society will take care of it's people".

Of course they won't. Have any idea how much a mental illness repulses most people? Now we have a completely mad street scene on our hands. People try to think up solutions that invests big dollars for accommodation, when really, these poor folks need a psychiatrist and monitoring.

The drugs are a symptom, not the underlying issue.

Also, about investment... I am probably the most right wing hippy you will ever meet. But this is where hippy meets wealth--I see investment as more then a dollar.

Sometimes it actually is a dollar, but on other occasions, it is time, learning, even understanding--talking to the right person at the right time.

Every single expenditure in our house is weighed on money vs time vs skills, for every last thing that we want.

I seem surrounded with wealth for an outsider--till they look at my bank account. It doesn't matter, really. I'm much beyond dollars now that I know that there is always a sideways route to a goal.

Good example--living like two gypsies, working when we want to, I stopped working to get pregnant. Fixed up a rental house, good, to kill stagnant time. The whole world told me to stop--it's not your house.

One person, however, who is a secretly wealthy person, living cheap and renting with roommates, saw me go and decided to invest in a house for us. He's convinced I can turn a profit on it. He's for sure right.

Investment has many folds, I think. But then again, I'm 32.... a big portion of my head is probably still lodged up my arse :)

Investment is a good thing for the nation but sometimes we have to invest in more than just our businesses. The exchange theory economists like to say the invisible hand of capitalism will somehow make everything reach it's highest & best use but they somehow ignore the role of a socialized system to support, defend and augment that "free market".

How would the shrewd investors in Walmart fare if they had to pick up the social costs of production that everybody else subsidizes? How would the brilliant people at Apple Computer survive if there were no public schools to train the teachers that taught their workers? Or to pay for the army that defends the oil fields that provides the petroleum for their workers to get to the microsoft campus (much less having to also pay for the off ramp from the freeway or the State Patrol officer that ensures the dual occupancy lanes stay available for car poolers.

This pull yourself up by your bootstraps bullshit (because by God my grandpa did) doesn't hold up when to even cursory examination. Try sometime to bump the inheritance tax and you will see who really believes in the self-reliant man.

The definition of a "fair" tax is, of course, is one that somebody else pays. I say let every industrious person keep every nickel they earn during their lifetime and give up when they and/or their spouse passes on. There is nothing fairer than making the dead pay the taxes.

Spread that wealth around to some people who didn't win the lucky sperm contest and I think you will not only learn who has been swimming naked but you'll figure out who can actually swim.

"This pull yourself up by your bootstraps bullshit (because by God my grandpa did) doesn't hold up when to even cursory examination. Try sometime to bump the inheritance tax and you will see who really believes in the self-reliant man."

Btw Tim, Ayn is my favorite personality of yours :)

Let's take a look at this. Perhaps America is different then here, but I do have enough deep south train-hopper friends, who live very very freely, to know better.

Full disclosure--spent 1 1/2 years in the streets. No money, no direction, no help. Never blew anyone for money, never sold a drug. Never kissed up to anyone, and I'm a 5'6" skinny blond frenchy. Dog eat dog is only true if you make it so.

I can tell you for sure that there is a big old world out there, of bored people who just want to be a little happier, way beyond money and family and picture perfect good times.

The whole lot of you woodwebers--you really after money? I say bs. You wouldn't be making cabinets. But lots of times making cabinets tends to suck. What if the day-to-day got more fun?

Get a little friendlier with the world around you. It might just surprise you.

"they somehow ignore the role of a socialized system to support, defend and augment that "free market"."

The example that is typically used in this discussion is Sweden. But the actual fact is that sweden was very very free market up until 1950 when it's government spending increased from 20% of the GDP to 50% of the GDP which severely hurt their economy and in all reality any socialism is simply borrowing from tomorrow to consume today. The same could be said for this country except we have the reserve currency status that shields us from the inflation by simply exporting it. But the chickens will come home to roost when the entitlements come to full bloom.

"How would the shrewd investors in Walmart fare if they had to pick up the social costs of production that everybody else subsidizes?"

They do pay the highest corporate taxes in the world. They do raise the standard of living of their customers.

"How would the brilliant people at Apple Computer survive if there were no public schools to train the teachers that taught their workers?"

Does that include the ones in China?
What about the people who home school? Jobs himself dropped out. I don't know about your neck of the woods but Calif teachers are almost the highest paid in the US and have almost the lowest test scores in the US. Either way the consumer pays for any expenses as the store simply raises the prices to cover the increased cost. Or he pays taxes to cover the cost of the subsidies. But again you fail to recognize crony capitalism is different than capitalism.

"Or to pay for the army that defends the oil fields that provides the petroleum for their workers to get to the microsoft campus"

What this country does not recognize is that almost all of the wars have been provoked though lies. Wilson sent the Lusitania into U Boat infested waters despite Germany warning him not to. FDR put sanctions on Japan almost forcing them into war. LBJ made up the story about the Gulf of Tonkin. Bush made up the story about WMDs.

"This pull yourself up by your bootstraps bullshit (because by God my grandpa did) doesn't hold up when to even cursory examination."

Horatio Algiers is alive today just severely hamstrung by the regulations or what I call regime uncertainty. But none the less there are plenty of magnanimous souls who succeed any way. And you Tim are one of them.

"Try sometime to bump the inheritance tax and you will see who really believes in the self-reliant man."

So then the family farm has to be sold to pay the inheritance tax? Not to mention the tax on tax.

"The definition of a "fair" tax is, of course, is one that somebody else pays. I say let every industrious person keep every nickel they earn during their lifetime and give up when they and/or their spouse passes on. There is nothing fairer than making the dead pay the taxes."

Accept to their heirs who have to sell the family farm.

"Spread that wealth around to some people who didn't win the lucky sperm contest and I think you will not only learn who has been swimming naked but you'll figure out who can actually swim."

So we have 99 week unemployment and 10 million more Americans permanently disabled and collecting social security. You do know that over half of all Americans now collect some sort of public transfer?

The farms we have in this country are either owned by mega corporations or some podunk family on a government tit. Take away the subsidy and there is no "family farm".

If you want a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps economy" then do exactly that. Stop insulating the progeny. If the kid can't make it on his own let him get a job in a cabinet shop.

Who do you think gets more subsidy? The guy on unemployment or the "free market" capitalist who owns the banks? When Blackstone or General Electric is deducting interest from the single family mortgages they hold while the property is going up in value is this not a subsidy?

The tuition at a private school only covers a portion of the cost. The budget shortfall is made up by (tax deductible) donations by the kid's parents. Who do you think subsidizes these private schools that train our next captains of commerce?

"Who do you think gets more subsidy? The guy on unemployment or the "free market" capitalist who owns the banks? When Blackstone or General Electric is deducting interest from the single family mortgages they hold while the property is going up in value is this not a subsidy?"

Of course there is cronyism. That's the basis of tribe. All of the political and economic institutions we have are based on tribal cronyism. Not sure why this is significant to either side of spectrum.

One thing we do know is that those who rail against socialism should probably not be doing this online because it was the government boogeyman that created the internet of everything.

This is where the state interferes with the benchmark of value by introducing things like TARP, student loans, subidized water, ethanol that takes more energy to produce than it yields, cash for clunkers, etc etc etc

In theory socialism is comfier, but in reality the market is what brought you air conditioning, refrigeration, cars with blue tooth that last twice as long, houses that have indoor plumbing, a longer more comfy life span.

My guess is that Canada will be a better place to live when the SHTF. Their/ your banking system is 100 times more stable for reasons I won't bore you with.

My post #27 was misunderstood. I was repeating the fallacy argument put forth by some very socialist folks I know.
Mel, too cold in BC! The plains of Nebraska are quite bad enough but a little excitement is thrown in every year due to being in tornado alley.

Larry, I still remember your post in the gender thread about the people you employ, and how you tackle it. You've tapped into something big, IMO. This is community at the belly.

Pat--totally. I had a gig for a BMW marketing tour a whiles back that involved stretches of massive work, with stretches of sitting around beersing at local bnbs around the country. Got to know the German liaison very well--had a fantastic 2 am talk about how what happened to Germany could happen anywhere.

In essence, he is correct (Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority experiments is the key here). But one big detail about Canada, as you mention WSHTF--we got places to hide.

Conscription here would involve me taking my two favorite males to hide in the mountain. I even know where. No man of mine is going to war, ever.

But yes--you are right. Competition is fantastic. I'd rather be run by a man chasing a dollar in a free market then a biker/mafia exploiting lax laws.

It's a good thing the big ol world has a bit of everything. Get to see what theory does what.

Curiosity... ever heard of Anna Politkovskaya? Wrote about what actually happens in Eastern European armies (she recently got shot). I've seen my share of gruesome on this world but I could not stomach her book "Putin's Russia".

Being a mother in Eastern Europe revolves around knowing that one day, your beautiful boy will go get infections, addictions, beatings and rape for two years in obligatory army.

My dear Ayn--I hope this does not come off as a reproach, cause I sure do get how you got there....

This has tickled the ol brain while a stretch of bondoing today:

"If the kid can't make it on his own let him get a job in a cabinet shop"

I gotta ask--is this really how you see your employees?

I've noticed something lately--the whole world respects cabinet making... except for cabinet makers. What is this idea that it is a shodd job?

I a) don't actually have to work b) have a corporate following big enough step back into it at anytime c)have access to very high paying contract work d) enough education to go close to anywhere with it.

Never been happier then woodworking. Can't tell you how happy I am to get paid to play with saws and fun math. Throwing chunks of dead trees into fast rotating blades actually does make my heart sing.

As a smart person once said--"education is important but woodworking is importanter." Cover me in sawdust for decades, I'm in.

Our recent mass murderer of the area got away killing hookers for over a decade, because who cares if hookers go missing, apparently.

Digging up evidence required a mass team--they even had to pluck archeology grads to help, as it needed so much man power. Body parts all over mass acreage in the dirt business--dirt shuffling, coming and going out all day long.

2 days ago in sleepy Hatzic bc at the trailer park, a man came into a woman's trailor, tied her up and beat her with a hammer in front of her kid, and set the trailer on fire. Similar thing happened 3 months ago in another trailer park, but that time the guy also killed the kids.

Being raised by a forensic cop gets you lots of really gross dinner table conversation, and dispels the myth that bad things happen to "other people far away".

I think a lot about what makes some humans so violent. Why I feel queasy when I see someone get humiliated in public, but someone else gets a thrill from it.

Adrenaline/cortisol is my current theory--always up for revision of course. Hormones do dull higher cognition. Makes you one with the inner animal (pesky reptilian brain).

"IIRC since the mid 1800s the US has had 18 banking crisis compared to Canada's ZERO, in the same time period.

This is because the US mixes politics with the banking industry, Canada does not."

I did not know that! Very cool :)

We have however committed outrageous political sin--we let the church run the state for a while. Result?

Eugenics, abuse of orphans, the mentally ill, the poor. Poor children would get sent to insane asylums and beat and drugged etc. Telling patients they were to get their tonsils removed, putting them down, and neutering them, in the name of a better society. Some only found out years later they could no longer procreate.

Quebec's newer generations are very, very angry with the catholic church. Curses in English revolve around excrement and body parts and sexuality, whereas in Quebec curses are all church words--tabernacles, virgins, chalices, that wafer thingy the priest gives you, etc.

It was the main principle or axiom of Hitler (BTW you can tell when all conversations have hit rock bottom when someone starts talking about Hitler). Which IMO was given to him by the money guys using the Psychiatric community to implement it. Hitler employed 10s of thousands of Psychiatrists and Psychologists.

If one broadens their definition of War, then the 20th Century appears to be the worst in sheer numbers. Different from a rate of death per 100,000 or similar accounting.

Safer today than in the past? I don't know....

One can make the observation that in the 20th Century, the most hazardous thing to a person's health was higher education. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and many others demonized the intelligentsia in order to mobilize the great unwashed. Of course, the educated minority present a challenge to authority that is difficult, so it is better to lump all the educated together as elitist, or whatever the demon of the week is. Current trends do not appear to have changed any.

Got me, but a prerequisite to looking at anything, requires that you first determine if what you are looking at is in the same zipcode of what you interested in.

The thing that piqued my interest in economics was the 2008 crash. Because of a hobby of mine called survival. But if you are not interested in survival this thread probably would not be of much interest to you.

As far as laying out a shop goes I usually just draw the shop in Autocad 3d or in Solidworks. Short of that I layout the shop on paper to scale and then cut out the various machines to scale and see what layout works the best.

E.G. the couple getting a divorce, the lawyer profits from the dissonance he creates, the Indian goes to war with the rancher the banker trades guns with the Indians for yellow iron and then lends money to the rancher to defend himself.

On a bigger scale Argentina goes to war with Great Britain over the Falkland Islands, purely by coincidence (sarcasm) Argentina is having financial difficulties, so the ruling Junta decides to create a diversion to take their constituent's minds off of finance.

Or the military industrial complex and the bankers cook up a war in Iraq first by playing/lying to Hussein about the ramifications if he invades Kuwait. And then by cooking up WMDs. This handiwork has kept the US in "crises" for over 20yr and trillions of dollars in sales.

Theologian: There are two, mostly separate, seats of power/control, governments and religions. They mostly use two different forms of control, penalty now or latter. They both use a mix just to different degrees. The nifty thing about religion is what they promise comes after you can't tell if you got the 72 virgins or not.

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There are often situations when the original message asks for opinions: "What is the best widget for my type of shop?". To a certain extent, the person posting the message is responsible for including specific questions within the message. An open ended question (like the one above) invites responses that may read as sales pitches. WOODWEB suggests that companies responding to such a question provide detailed and substantive replies rather than responses that read as a one-sided product promotion. It has been WOODWEB's experience that substantive responses are held in higher regard by our readers (return to top).

The staff of WOODWEB assume no responsibility for the accuracy, content, or outcome of any posting transmitted at WOODWEB's Message Boards. Participants should undertake the use of machinery, materials and methods discussed at WOODWEB's Message Boards after considerate evaluation, and at their own risk. WOODWEB reserves the right to delete any messages it deems inappropriate. (return to top)

Forum Posting Form Guidelines

Your Name

The name you enter in this field will be the name that appears with your post or response (return to form).

Your Website

Personal or business website links must point to the author's website. Inappropriate links will be removed without notice, and at WOODWEB's sole discretion. WOODWEB reserves the right to delete any messages with links it deems inappropriate. (return to form)

E-Mail Address

Your e-mail address will not be publicly viewable. Forum participants will be able to contact you using a contact link (included with your post) that is substituted for your actual address. You must include a valid email address in this field. (return to form)

Subject

Subject may be edited for length and clarity. Subject lines should provide an indication of the content of your post. (return to form)

Thread Related Link and Image Guidelines

Thread Related Links posted at WOODWEB's Forums and Exchanges should point to locations that provide supporting information for the topic being discussed in the current message thread. The purpose of WOODWEB Forums is to provide answers, not to serve as an advertising venue. A Thread Related Link that directs visitors to an area with inappropriate content will be removed. WOODWEB reserves the right to delete any messages with links or images it deems inappropriate. (return to form)

Thread Related File Uploads

Thread Related Files posted at WOODWEB's Forums and Exchanges should provide supporting information for the topic being discussed in the current message thread. Video Files: acceptable video formats are: .MOV .AVI .WMV .MPEG .MPG .FLV .MP4 (Image Upload Tips) If you encounter any difficulty when uploading video files, E-mail WOODWEB for assistance. The purpose of WOODWEB Forums is to provide answers, not to serve as an advertising venue. A Thread Related File that contains inappropriate content will be removed, and uploaded files that are not directly related to the message thread will be removed. WOODWEB reserves the right to delete any messages with links, files, or images it deems inappropriate. (return to form)

The editors, writers, and staff at WOODWEB try to promote safe practices.
What is safe for one woodworker under certain conditions may not be safe
for others in different circumstances. Readers should undertake the use
of materials and methods discussed at WOODWEB after considerate evaluation,
and at their own risk.